How Long Does It Take to Translate an Export Website from English to Chinese

How Long Does It Take to Translate an Export Website from English to Chinese

Translating an English website to Chinese is a crucial step to reach out to the Chinese-speaking market. However, since time is of the essence, it is always important to understand just how long it takes to translate an export website from English to Chinese.

This is because the length of time needed will set back a whole bunch of other business decisions. External SEO will have to wait until the site is done, email marketing is on hold, and B2B presentations are on hold as well because you can’t present a site to Chinese associates until it is completed.

Calculating the Average Time Frame for Translation

Just how long does it take a translation firm to change an English website with English graphics, page layouts, downloadable files, and others? There is no specific general rule because each job is different. However, you can break it down and get an estimate based on the following factors:

Amount of content – ask your website management team to breakdown every bit of content in your company’s website and see if they can get a total word count. This goes for every line of text, every word in every picture that needs to be edited on Photoshop, every word in every downloadable file, and so forth.

Translation pace – the average translator can translate about 2,000-2,500 words per day. That’s about 8 to 12 pages. Image editors can take up a whole day changing an English banner or infographic into Chinese. People working on coding can take up several weeks or months.

Putting the Numbers Together

The average website normally takes around several weeks for full translation, transliteration, and image editing. Add in a week or two for quality assurance checking and to test the altered website coding.

A small website can be done in 1-2 months but a site with a lot of content can easily take months. Generally translating an export site from English to Chinese isn’t charged by how long the task takes but how many words there are to work with. Additional services like coding, image editing, and SEO work will charge extra.